Blog: Collaborators – Ryan Campbell

Introduction

Ryan and I have been friends since high school but fell out of touch for a few years after high school. Work and school brought him to Regina, SK and before long, Ryan was helping with many shorts over the year period. His influence was huge during the year project.

About Ryan Campbell

Ryan is a jack of all trades but is currently going to school to be an engineer. He is currently on a work term in Saskatoon, SK but has an interest in filmmaking and photography and helps out whenever he has the chance. Below is a list of some of the projects we have worked on together.

Goldstream Provincial Park – 08/15/2011

Description: Ryan and I spent five hours within the Park filming a variety of cool locations. We wanted to show off the park in ways that most people wouldn’t see it.

Shawn Jobin – “Si j’vois pas demain” – 12/25/2010

Description: One of the hardest things to do for an up-and-coming artist is to develop an image that fits not only their style of music, but also what they value as an artist. The challenge is very similar to that of a high school student unsure what type of career to choose. When artists are in these types of positions, in many cases, they turn to others for help. For Shawn, although having already released an album, he recently broke from his first producer and is wanting to somewhat re-invent himself.

“A Foreign Song” Rough Assembly – 03/27/2010

Description: As our deadline approaches we are getting closer to where we need to be; picture lock. After completing all the tagging of clips and a rough pass on the film on the 22nd, we now officially have our first rough assembly. It is clear that everything is still rough. The sound is missing and it is 2 minutes too long. Both are small things that we will get done over the next couple days before it is due. I feel we managed to establish a nice pace to the film and it is easy to see the direction we are headed with the film. I am very excited with everything we have accomplished so far in such a short period of time. Everything is coming together nicely. I will be taking a step back from the project for two days before taking the second pass so I can have a fresh set of eyes before going any further. I also welcome any comments on the state of the film right now. Anything will only contribute to the quality of the project so send your comments this way!!

Natural Destruction – 03/25/2010

Description: The HVX is a very powerful work horse. I decided to try the scene file hacks with various frame rates, from 2 frames per second to 60 frames per second. All clips in this video were not slowed down or sped up. The only effects applied to this video was transparencies. The grainy look was from the Letus adapter.

“Death of a Proletariat” – Short Film – 03/24/2010

Description: For this video, Alex wanted to analyze the techniques used by Godard and see how the viewer interprets these films. In this video, Alex tried to create an atmosphere much like the ambiance many of Godard’s films embrace — using available light, talking directly into the camera, and editing techniques to test the viewer’s perceptual experience.

Nick’s Pool Hall – 03/23/2010

Description: To kick off the 2 week frenzy to catch up on 3 minute shorts, I decided to mix up the night into a few different areas. I decided that it was best to ease myself into this heavy regiment by completely finishing the daily video, doing a rough cut of second video from footage I shot when testing my camera last year, doing a second pass on “A Foreign Song”, and posting photos from the shoot this past weekend.

For “Nick’s Pool Hall”, we wanted to take a quick look at the art of pool playing. Both Ryan and I are not pros — we can barely even call ourselves amateurs. In any case, we decided to head down to the local pool hall and see how the camera would perform in low light. Although I do have over 2000hrs logged on my camera since I bought it, I still have not shot a lot of low light footage with rack focuses. I think the camera held up pretty good in these tests.

Camera Specs:

Record Format: 1080i24PA / 720P24PN / 1080i60i
Frame Rate: 24 / 60 / 1 frame per second
Shutter Speed: 1/60 / 1/60 / 1/15
F-Stop: 3.4 / OPEN / 3.4

During Post-Production, we initially wanted a long drawn out game and wanted to feature the fact that we were not pros. We wanted to include shots of us missing — many times — as we did (kind of like a blooper reel). In the end we found it felt more organic and fun to watch when it was edited tighter and focused more of the art of the game.

Pond Hockey – 03/12/2010

Description: I have played hockey for 13 years. However, since moving to Regina, I have not had the chance to play as often and have not made it out to the rink in a long time. I decided to head out and mix up my two passions; film making and hockey. I decided to take the camera out and see how smooth I could get the camera when skating along with the play. It is something that, with a little practice, could work very well.

I also decided to use the time to set up my third DSLR time lapse and I think I finally figured out a workflow that suits my needs — working with 2K files verses 5K unless I have time to let the time lapse process over night — which with my 3 minute shorts — is very hard to do.

Tech specs: For the video portions I shot at 60 frames per second with the shutter at 1/24 due to the limited light. Unfortunately, I was still forced to boost the brightness with Colorista as overcranking requires more light. This pushes me even more towards switching to DSLR for video as the low light capabilities blow the HVX out of the water — SOO much grain in this that the footage is unusable.

43 Below – 01/09/2010

Description: On an extremely cold night in Saskatchewan Canada, we ventured out to try and capture the harshness of the Saskatchewan winters (and yes, we did freeze). It ended up being my first experience with some sort of flickering light issue with the HVX. I hope to investigate this problem further with my next videos. Shot and Edited in two hours.